Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Krasner readily acknowledged the importance of Pollock on her artistic development, saying, “He would have influenced me even if I hadn’t married him. So did Picasso and Matisse and Mondrian. But I think I’ve held my own identity right through.” At the same time, the influence was inevitable by virtue of their marriage: “How can you live with someone without that happening, too? We never sat down and had a big art talk together. He’d come in and say, ‘Want to look at what I’ve done?’ And I’d invite him into my studio. Maybe I’d say, ‘Want to look at what I’ve done?’ But we never talked about, say, whether the edges should go inside or out, that sort of thing.”45 When Krasner was asked if she had an influence on Pollock, she was only willing to say, “I daresay that the only possible influence that I might have had was to bring Pollock an awareness of Matisse.”46

  At the time of Krasner’s show at Martha Jackson, the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art had, with her help and her approval, organized a circulating show of sixty of Pollock’s paintings that would travel around Europe, going from the Galleria Nazionale in Rome to museums in Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London.47

  Krasner’s own work got international attention in April 1958, when it was included in “International Art of a New Era,” an art exhibition arranged by the French curator and critic Michel Tapié at the Gallery of Takashimaya for Japan’s Osaka Art Festival. Krasner was represented by Rose Red (1958) and her monumental canvas The Seasons (1957), which features forms that make allusions to human anatomy, suggesting sexuality and regenerative life forces. Krasner feared flying, so she chose not to travel with her art to Japan and missed an opportunity to promote her work in Asia.

  Krasner continued to see friends in East Hampton, including Patsy Southgate, then divorced, who met her future husband, the artist Michael Goldberg at Krasner’s home over Memorial Day weekend, which opened the 1958 season.48 During that summer, Krasner again showed her work at the Signa Gallery in East Hampton. She participated in the second year’s first show called “The Artists’ Vision—1948–1958,” which featured the work of Hans Hofmann, who was “among the artists from outside this area who have been invited to participate.” Krasner showed Continuum (1949, a canvas on loan from Ossorio and not for sale), a collage called The City (1953, not for sale), and Four, a canvas from 1957, for which she asked one thousand dollars. Krasner’s price was small compared to Hofmann’s; his works were priced at three to six thousand dollars.49 Some of Krasner’s old friends showed, including Perle Fine, Balcomb Greene, Ibram Lassaw, and the gallery’s three founders.50

  Krasner’s friendship with Perle Fine was beginning to blossom again after their days together in Hofmann’s class. Four years earlier, Krasner had convinced Fine to give up her Tenth Street studio and move out to Springs. “It was through Lee that we decided to come out here on the East End,” Fine explained. “Lee was always talking about how wonderful it was, how much she and Jackson enjoyed it.”51 That same summer Fine posed for a photograph taken by her husband, Maurice Berezov. The photo depicts de Kooning grinning in the center, flanked by Fine and, on the other side, a smiling Ruth Kligman, who had moved on after Pollock’s death to have an affair with de Kooning. Though still technically married to Elaine, he had also fathered a daughter with Joan Ward just a few years before.52 It is not known if Krasner knew that Fine was spending time with de Kooning; but living in the small town, she did hear about Kligman’s relationship with the artist who was still seen as Pollock’s chief rival.

  David Slivka recalled that Krasner invited him and his wife, Rose, to come out from the city for a weekend. Early in the morning, while the women were still asleep, Slivka went for a walk and ran right into de Kooning pushing Kligman on a bicycle. Bill invited him over for coffee. While there Slivka saw some of Ruth’s paintings and thought it bizarre that she was trying to imitate de Kooning’s style. When he returned to Krasner’s, Rose asked where he had been, and he said he’d been having coffee. But when he asked indiscreetly what Lee thought of Kligman and de Kooning renting Conrad Marca-Relli’s cottage next door to her, she replied, “She’s suing me!”53 Indeed Kligman had sued Krasner to force her insurance to pay her medical expenses from the crash that killed Pollock.

  The gossip and posturing around Krasner must have made things difficult for her. She was not one to cower in a corner, however, and so she just kept trying to be Lee Krasner, the artist, which meant participating in a third show that season, called “The Human Image.” Thanks to Ossorio, the show projected an international perspective, including, among others, Dubuffet and Karel Appel, as well as sculpture by David Smith and James Rosati. Additionally there was the work of Pollock and Grace Hartigan, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and the gallery’s founders.

  Krasner showed Prophecy, which was the canvas that had remained on her easel when she left for Europe in 1956. Ossorio had reserved it, so it was not for sale, but Krasner’s agreement to have it in this particular show marks her public acknowledgment of its “human” or figurative image. “I got back from Europe and this painting—once more I had to look at it and deal with it; Prophecy still frightened me enormously. I couldn’t read why it frightened me so, and even now would be hard put to do so. And so in that sense the painting becomes an element of the unconscious—as one might bring forth a dream.”54 Ossorio paid $720 to Martha Jackson Gallery for Prophecy, of which $120 went to Signa Gallery for its commission.55

  That summer Lee had two young men live in what was little more than a shed on the Fireplace Road property—Bob Friedman’s brother, Sanford (Sandy), a novelist, and his partner, Richard Howard, a poet. Krasner became close to the men, who returned to live in the little house for the next two summers as well. Krasner and Pollock had acquired the building to serve as her studio, but since she began to work in the barn that had been Pollock’s studio, she later gave this one to her nephew Ronald Stein and his wife to use as a house, surely hoping that their presence would allay her fears of living alone.

  Howard recalled, “If there was no houseguest, if Sanford or I were unavailable, then a neighbor’s daughter, a child would do, but there had to be someone there. And if she could not sleep, even less could she concentrate on a book.”56 Richard and Sandy not only read aloud to Krasner, but they also helped her name her paintings. Their friendship with Krasner lasted until her death.

  In autumn 1958, It is, the avant-garde journal, reproduced seventeen signature plates of work by contemporary artists, including Krasner’s and Perle Fine’s. Many of the others were much younger.57 That same year Bob Friedman, then vice president of Uris Brothers, a real estate company, commissioned Krasner to create two large mosaic panels for the exterior of their corporate headquarters, a thirty-story building at 2 Broadway, near the southern tip of Manhattan.58 The architects for this building, Emery Roth & Sons, had suggested, in the preliminary renderings, that a mural, made of durable glass mosaic set in cement, be placed between the second and third floors at the main Broadway entrance. The larger of the two murals was to be eighty-six feet long and twelve feet high, and a second, smaller mural was commissioned for the building’s facade on Broad Street.

  Bob Friedman had long admired Krasner’s mosaic table in her house.59 She had also worked on immense murals while on the WPA, so she felt up to the challenge for the Uris Brothers project. “By the time I came to do a mosaic in the Uris Brothers building in downtown Manhattan, eighty-six feet long, that scale was nothing new to me. Long before I met Pollock, too, I had been working that large.”60

  Krasner also saw this commission as an opportunity to help her nephew’s career. It was a poignant decision. When her mother died in 1959, Krasner’s siblings and nieces and nephews were the only family she had left. Among all her relatives that she had taken under her wing, Ronald Stein, the son of her sister Ruth, became an artist. Having influenced him, she felt responsible for his future.

  The artist Will Barnet still recalls that Krasner sent Stein to study with him at Cooper Union,
where she had begun her own education, and that Stein had talent but “kept getting into fights in bars.”61 After his study at Cooper, Stein earned an MFA at Yale. Stein, then in his late twenties, had already done some mosaics of his own, including a commission for a series of panels representing the Stations of the Cross.62 For the Uris Brothers mural, the aunt and nephew team produced both a scaled study in collage format and studies of the mural’s details.

  Bob Friedman was both the impresario commissioning the project and the mural’s promoter. He wrote about it for Craft Horizon and compared Krasner and Stein’s efforts to those of Gaudí in Spain.63 The two artists, in an attempt to avoid “rigidity,” elected to have the glass plates of the mural broken into free-form or random shapes, rather than have the Italian glass cut into the typical “tesserae” pattern. Rules of union labor in New York City prohibited the artists from doing the physical work themselves, and they were not even able to touch the materials without fear of provoking a strike. Instead Krasner and Stein closely supervised the work, even to the mixing of the cement, so they achieved the dark color they envisioned. Even being allowed to watch while the craftsmen worked was itself a concession on the part of the union.

  Krasner accepted the union’s control, but she believed it made it impossible to produce inventive mosaics in New York.64 Union workers expected to work with a sketch and evenly spaced tesserae and ordered directional patterns. The union workers ignored the idea, understood during antiquity and the Middle Ages, that mosaic could modulate light. They couldn’t understand murals as abstract as Krasner’s.

  Krasner’s loss of her mother, following closely on Pollock’s death, disturbed her so much that she was not able to sleep. Years later she told an interviewer, “I wasn’t allowed to mourn at my own tempo—which might have seemed sluggish to some people.”65

  Krasner had also stopped living in East Hampton year-round, and the move to Manhattan was a major change. She finally acknowledged to herself that she was suffering from chronic insomnia and took to painting at night in the city. Because she had to work under artificial light, she reduced her palette to umber and white. The poet Richard Howard recalled how startled he and Sandy Friedman were “that all the new paintings were coming out, as we used to say, Ahab-colored.” Ahab was the brown poodle Ossorio and Dragon had given Krasner and Pollock.

  Howard asked Krasner if this color “represented a descent into a new crucible of emotions…a specific registration of grief. Were these not mourning paintings.”66 Krasner demurred, “I was going down deep into something which wasn’t easy or pleasant…. Well, there was so much taking place. My mother dies at this time. A lot happens aside from my grief for Jackson. There are many elements. I cancel my show with Greenberg—a show scheduled at French and Co. And these paintings are already under way.”67 It was as if some deep-seated depression had finally caught up with her, and she turned to making large, somber canvases that cried out with emotional chaos. She renounced color, explaining, “I like daylight. Those were the only paintings done by artificial light. Those paintings [were] done in deep turmoil.”68

  One of the first paintings of this type is The Gate, a monumental canvas that she was working on during the summer of 1959 after her move into the barn studio. During its creation, Halley Erskine photographed Krasner while she worked. With The Gate, “There was a demand to abstract it to this point. The imagery is much clearer in the early version, however you’re going to read it. The title The Gate is much connected with my mother’s death, at least on a conscious level when it was painted.”69 In its early stages, The Gate had many recognizable shapes, but in its final version, it was filled with energetic lines and splashes of white paint. Describing this canvas and its series, she explained, “These are physical paintings. The gesture is a thrust—I don’t generally do that.”70 In fact her gesture makes one think of Pollock.

  Krasner’s depression was exacerbated by an upsetting falling-out with Clement Greenberg, which aborted plans for her show at the gallery French & Company in 1959. Greenberg had recently started working for the gallery, and accounts differ over what happened between him and Krasner. At the time of the clash, Greenberg was still in therapy with Ralph Klein, who by then had joined with Saul Newton and Jane Pearce in the Sullivanian Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis. Greenberg, who was not normally an early riser, was reporting for 9:30 A.M. appointments with Klein several days a week. He was reputed to be taking prescription sleep medication and drinking martinis in the afternoon.71 Klein notoriously was not wont to help his patients control their intake of alcohol and drugs.

  When Greenberg began his association with the contemporary art gallery French & Company in March 1959, it was already experiencing serious financial problems, though he didn’t know it at the time. He was expected to turn a profit. In a letter dated August 1, 1959, to “Mrs. Lee Pollock,” Spencer Samuels, whose family owned the gallery, thanked Lee for her warm hospitality during a delightful weekend in Springs and mentioned that he had also thanked Alfonso [Ossorio] with whom he enjoyed a provocative conversation. He told Krasner that her show was excellent and that he felt certain that “Clem will go along with the idea of a ‘semi-retrospective’ show unless he has something particular in mind in regard to your work.”72 He also assured Krasner that he was making an effort to “rough out” an agreement about some of the issues that they had covered during the weekend.

  Greenberg’s most recent biographer claims that the critic wanted to show Pollock’s work, but that Krasner “insisted that he also give her a show. Greenberg agreed, but his evident reluctance so angered her that she canceled both her and Pollock’s shows.”73

  On May 20, 1973, Greenberg wrote an angry response to the editor of Arts Magazine regarding a published conversation between Cindy Nemser and Krasner. Greenberg’s letter, which was published in the November issue, claimed that Krasner erred in describing him as French & Company’s director, stating that all he did was serve as “adviser” to its contemporary art department.74 In the letter, Greenberg had crossed out nearly two lines from his original typescript that can still be deciphered. Perhaps his anger no longer allowed him to express his early regard for Krasner’s work.

  In his effort to contradict Krasner, Greenberg wrote, “When in the spring of 1959, Miss Krasner proposed to me, out of the blue, that she have a show at French & Co. I agreed immediately.” He then stated that Krasner also asked for a show of Pollock’s black and white paintings. “To this I didn’t agree so readily; I was afraid it would look like a tie-in. But Miss Krasner overcame my qualms, & in the end I agreed to the Pollock show too.”75 Greenberg agreed that Krasner had canceled her show because of his negative “response” to her new work. He claimed, however, that he had scheduled the show “out of my personal & professional regard for her,” rather than out of admiration for her work.76

  He followed this amended passage by asserting that after he had visited Krasner’s studio, discussion about the Pollock show ceased. Not having access to the Pollock estate was a source of great bitterness for Greenberg, who saw himself as having promoted Pollock from the beginning.

  It is difficult to know whether or not Greenberg’s account above is legitimate, because he later contradicted himself about Krasner in a lengthy interview with Florence Rubenfeld, his first biographer:

  When I became an advisor to French and Co., ’59…[Krasner] wanted me to tell French to put on a show of Jackson’s black and white pictures from before ’51 (when he’d done a whole series of black and whites that had been exhibited). These were antecedent to those. And I said sure that’d be great. And then she said, “and a show for me.” And I said—I was being so pure and I was showing off to myself which I’ve done in the past—and I said no. It looks too much like a tie [in]. A show for you but not for Pollock. This in front of Porter [Macray of MoMA] and Jenny [Greenberg’s wife]…. And finally I said, OK I’m being too pure. A show for both of you. I’ll tell French. And that was that. And then we went to Eu
rope. And when we came back we went out to see Lee and her studio and socially.77

  When Greenberg and his wife went to Springs as Lee’s houseguests, her show was still on his mind. Lee’s friend Patsy Southgate was there. “So after this woman left, and the moment the door shut. What came first I don’t know, but I’d gone to see Lee’s studio and I’d seen the pictures and I didn’t like them. Lee was not a good painter. [Greenberg struck this line out of the transcript sent to him by Rubenfeld.] She was so accomplished but it was hollow. And first Lee got mad at Jenny because Jenny had [said] something critical about the lady who had been there…. I [had] seen her pictures and I had and I didn’t like them.”78 In her biography, Rubenfeld highlighted the fact that the Greenbergs were staying with Lee. In her interview, she asked Greenberg, “God, and you had to tell her you didn’t like her paintings?”

  Greenberg responded:

  Yah. And Lee wasn’t large-souled. She wasn’t magnanimous. And Jenny said to me, let’s go. Let’s go. And I—with my newly found analytic piety [his handwritten correction of views] said no, we can’t leave angry. We’ll sweat this out. Don’t leave angry. We’re friends and all that. And so, somehow we got thru dinner and I got up the next morning and Lee’s face was swollen. You know there are people, and I’ve noticed this before who when they sleep on their rage when they get up their faces are swollen. And she drove us to the train station [twenty minutes away] and I said some pious thing like we’re still friends and so forth. No, she was angry, angry, angry. With her swollen face. And so we told her, don’t wait for the train with us. We didn’t want her to wait.79

  Later in the same interview—held nearly six years after Krasner’s death—Rubenfeld skillfully questioned Greenberg about his estimate of Krasner’s painting, asking if he had seen her painting since this last acrimonious encounter. He admitted: